The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Emigrant Trail, by Geraldine Bonner

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Title: The Emigrant Trail

Author: Geraldine Bonner

Release Date: August 24, 2006 [EBook #19113]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE EMIGRANT TRAIL ***

Produced by Al Haines

[Frontispiece: He gathered her in his arms, and bending low carried her
back into the darkened cavern.]

THE EMIGRANT TRAIL

BY

GERALDINE BONNER

NEW YORK

GROSSET & DUNLAP

PUBLISHERS

COPYRIGHT, 1910, BY

DUFFIELD & COMPANY

Published, April, 1910

CONTENTS

PART I

THE PRAIRIE

PART II

THE RIVER

PART III

THE MOUNTAINS

PART IV

THE DESERT

PART V

THE PROMISED LAND

THE EMIGRANT TRAIL

PART I

The Prairie

CHAPTER I

It had rained steadily for three days, the straight, relentless rain of
early May on the Missouri frontier. The emigrants, whose hooded wagons
had been rolling into Independence for the past month and whose tents
gleamed through the spring foliage, lounged about in one another's
camps cursing the weather and swapping bits of useful information.

The year was 1848 and the great California emigration was still twelve
months distant. The flakes of gold had already been found in the race
of Sutter's mill, and the thin scattering of men, which made the
population of California, had left their plows in the furrow and their
ships in the cove and gone to the yellow rivers that drain the Sierra's
mighty flanks. But the rest of the world knew nothing of this yet.
They were not to hear till November when a ship brought the news to New
York, and from city and town, from village and cottage, a march of men
would turn their faces to the setting sun and start for the land of
gold.

Those now bound for California knew it only as the recently acquired
strip of territory that lay along the continent's Western rim, a place
of perpetual sunshine, where everybody had a chance and there was no
malaria. That was what they told each other as they lay under the
wagons or sat on saddles in the wet tents. The story of old Roubadoux,
the F